Really?
Friday 22 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
According to an editor’s note at Harper’s Daily, Obama’s biggest problem is that he doesn’t believe in the voodoo economics of the minimum wage (supply and demand anyone?) and that he isn’t in to mercantilism enough, rather instead, he’s too much in to that whole free trade thing where consumers are able to get the products they want at affordable prices because of large pools of competitors.
Yet the address contained hardly anything progressive: On the contrary, Obama’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to only $9 an hour — and not for two years — was a populist parody. Under the president’s proposal, a minimum-wage worker supporting a family of three (two parents, one child) would make $18,720 a year in 2015 — barely above today’s federal poverty line of $18,480 and well short of the 1968 peak, inflation-adjusted, of $21,840 a year, or $10.50 an hour. Combined with Obama’s mosquito bite of an increase in the top marginal income-tax rate to 39.6 percent — restoring Bill Clinton’s top rate would still put it at way less than the Eisenhower-era top rate of 91 percent — the minimum-wage bill insults the many millions of less fortunate people who voted for the incumbent. So much for “activist government” and an “impressive” agenda.
[. . .]
Lately, besides talking up “deficit reduction” and creating a “thriving middle class,” Obama is pushing an even more ambitious and destructive “free trade” agenda certain to weaken the middle class even more. The ultra-realistic Financial Times reported last month that Obama had put “trade at the heart of” his agenda. This means we will no doubt see lovely bipartisan cooperation between the two enemy parties when there’s real money on the table for their big donors.
Of the proposed deals, the most damaging for American manufacturing and decent factory wages would be the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which if signed would follow on Obama’s 2011 job-killing trifecta — the “free-trade” agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. More Japanese and other Asian imports would result, but Obama’s cheerleaders in the media blur the debate by touting a supposed manufacturing revival they cutely call “insourcing.” The insourcing “boom” is another administration fraud (see anything written by Alan Tonelson), but it neatly distracts people from the ever-increasing foreign-trade deficit.
Why not $20 an hour? Why stop at $10.50? It’s not as if the value of money is based on its scarcity in an economy, or that the cost of living would skyrocket due to a large influx of cash, largely negating wage raises.
And I HATE how I, a representative of the middle class, am able to go out and buy the shit I want or need at decent prices due to international competition. It’s really weakening me to buy Korean-made goods at low prices. It would be so much better if I had to pay much higher prices due to the cost of American labor, especially once you factor in the extra cost that would be added on to goods by hiking the minimum wage by nearly 50%. That’ll be so much better. I definitely want to move the economic clock back 300 years to where we have government protectionism of local manufacturers in order to be on the “winning” end of the so-called “balance of trade.”
Really, John?
2013-03-22 » madlibertarianguy